Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875 - 1935)

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Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her family heritage included African-American, Native American, Creole, and Anglo roots, and her work explores the complexities of racial identity and the unique regional setting of New Orleans. Dunbar-Nelson graduated from Straight University and published her first collection, Violets and Other Tales (1895), when she was barely twenty. Driven and ambitious, she taught in the public school system and supported herself through her writing. Dunbar-Nelson was also a committed feminist and social activist whose political work included advocating for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1924 and working for women’s suffrage. Although she was briefly married to poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and is often associated with his career, her work stands on its own merit.

Like other authors of this era, Dunbar-Nelson had a difficult time publishing fiction that addressed the racism and oppression experienced by African-Americans at the turn of the century. Like Dunbar, she was also pressured to write in dialect, a rhetorical device utilized in the stories found in this anthology. Besides short stories, Dunbar-Nelson avidly published poetry, essays, journalism, and plays.